This article explains how to record and approve work hours in Personio.

A requirement for ensuring that your employees' work hours are recorded correctly is that work schedules have to be configured and appropriately assigned. The work schedules you store in Personio specify how many hours each employee is required to work and on which weekdays. This is particularly important to ensure that overtime and vacation entitlements are calculated correctly.

Recording Attendances

Your employees’ attendances are recorded in Personio in the Employee profile under Attendance.  Employees who hold the necessary access rights can either record their working hours, breaks, project times and comments there or quickly add their working hours and breaks directly on their Dashboard via the Today's time tracking widget.

Time tracking in the Attendance tab

The Attendance tab of the Employee profile offers a comprehensive overview on pending and approved working hours, breaks and overtime for each month. Employees can record their working hours, breaks and project times for each working day by clicking on the plus symbol in the attendance calendar, or by copying attendances for specific days or the whole month.

Record attendances  

Attendance periods can be entered fully or partially, in which case an orange warning triangle appears. This means that you can enter a starting time in the morning and add an ending time in the evening without losing the first entry.

You can add as many work periods or break as you need by simply clicking on Add work or Add break. You can add breaks manually, or the time period between two work periods will automatically be considered a break.

By clicking on a specific day, you can edit all work times and break times at once. You can also delete each work period or each break separately or delete all tracked periods for one day at once by clicking on the three dots on the upper right corner of each day.

If project-based time tracking is enabled, the employees can register tracked hours for the project, as well as comments for each tracked time period.

If break rules have been specified in the work schedule, employees will see a warning when insufficient breaks have been entered. A purple clock indicates the days on which overtime or deficit hours have been recorded.

After the entered time is approved (by a supervisor or the HR department, depending on the access rights and the approval process), the status is updated from Pending to Approved. If an attendance entry is rejected by the approver – due to insufficient break times for example – the employee can edit it and resubmit.

Changes to pending or approved attendance records can be made if a proposal right has been granted for the attendances. Changing an approved record will trigger the approval process.

Days with no time tracked

Depending on the settings of your company's Personio account, the message No time tracked might appear on the days where employees were supposed to work according to their work schedule, but did not track an attendance period neither an absence. 

This message indicates that deficit hours are being tracked automatically and that every time that an employee does not track time on a workday, their overtime hours will be automatically recalculated.

Copy attendances 

The Copy hours feature allows employees with proposal rights to copy working hours, breaks, comments and projects of any approved or pending day either to all other working days, or specific days of the week for the whole month. 

To copy hours for a working day, employees can hover over the cell for a particular day in the calendar, and click on the Copy hours icon located on the top right corner. In the pop-up window, either all Working days for my work schedule or Specific days of the week can be selected. Comments and projects can be added optionally and will also be copied to the selected days. With click on Copy the change will be applied for all selected days of the month.

Note that hours can only be copied into other days within the same month. Furthermore, hours cannot be copied into days with public holidays, approved absences or existing time entries. 

Quick access via Today's time tracking on the Dashboard

In addition to recording working hours in the Attendance tab of the Employee profile, employees can use the Today's time tracking widget on their dashboards. The widget allows employees to quickly and efficiently enter work and break times without having to navigate to the Attendance tab.

Please note that the employees should only write complete entries. Partial recording of the working time is only possible via the Attendance tab.

If break rules have been enabled for the assigned work schedule, employees will see a warning, if insufficient breaks have been entered.

If overtime and deficit hours are enabled for the assigned work schedule, the tracked time will be marked purple and indicated by a clock symbol.

Please note that while the Today's time tracking widget allows employees to quickly add work and break times, entering project times and comments is only possible in the Attendance tab of the Employee profile. Equally changes to existing attendance records can be made in the Attendance tab, if a proposal right has been granted for the attendances.

Approving Attendances

If attendances are to be approved before they are stored in the system, access rights have to be configured and a suitable approval process be set up.

When an employee enters a time entry in their Attendance tab, it will first appear in the status Pending. Personio will then send an approval request for time tracking to the employee who has been set as an approver through the settings (generally the supervisor).

The approval request for time tracking will be notified through the dashboard (All approvals widget and Tasks widget) and, if enabled, via email. Depending on the approver's access rights, the approval request will also be notified through the Workflows dashboard widget.

By clicking on the notifications, the approver will be directed to the Time Tracking Approvals page, where they will be able to see all the approval requests for time tracking for which they are responsible and need to approve. This page is also accessible through Time Tracking in the sidebar. 

By clicking on the individual days, the approver can view the details of the recorded work hours and break times, as well as project times and comments.

Using the button on the right, each daily entry can be approved or rejected individually or viewed in the respective employee's Attendance tab.

If an attendance entry is rejected (e.g. because of a break rule violation that is indicated to the approver through an orange warning triangle), it is returned to the employee who can then edit it and resubmit it for approval. Approvers also have the option of approving all of the employee's attendances submitted at once by clicking the button Approve all.